Pen Parentis Literary Salons: join us as we launch our 25th Season! Incredible writers are brought together with YOU the audience online to talk about current books, the profession of writing, craft, and life-work balance! This livecast event will feature short readings by three extraordinary Pen Parentis writers followed by a lively roundtable.
THE WRITERS ARE:
TINA CHANG Brooklyn Poet Laureate, is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida (W.W. Norton, 2019), Of Gods & Strangers (2011, FWB), Half-Lit Houses (2004, FWB). She is also co-editor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton). Her poems have been published in journals such as American Poet, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Ploughshares. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among others. She is the Director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University and lives in Brooklyn with her family. This is her second appearance at a Pen Parentis Literary Salon.
KRISTOPHER JANSMA is the author of Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has written for the New York Times, Chicago Quarterly Review, ZYZZVA, The Believer, Prairie Schooner, and Electric Literature. His work has been noted as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016 and The Best American Essays 2014. He is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz. He lives in Westchester with his wife and two children. We welcome Kris to Pen Parentis for a third time!
ESTHER AMINI Esther Amini is a writer, painter, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. Her short stories have appeared in Elle, Lilith, Tablet, The Jewish Week, Barnard Magazine, TK University’s Inscape Literary, Proximity, Paper Brigade, and Zibby Owens’ Anthology: Moms Don’t Have Time To. She was named one of Aspen Words’ two best emerging memoirists and awarded its Emerging Writer Fellowship in 2016 based on her memoir entitled: Concealed. Her pieces have been performed by Jewish Women’s Theatre in Los Angeles and in Manhattan, and was chosen by JWT as their Artist-in-Residence in 2019. Kirkus Reviews has named Concealed one of the best 2020 Indie Books, and ChaiFlicks, (Jewish Netflix), is presently streaming an excerpt from Concealed called AM-REE-KAH.